The historic City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco has always been at the front of anti-censorship issues. The store/publisher was begun by Peter Martin and Lawrence Ferlinghetti to publish Bay Area writers, including Allen Ginsburg’s controversial Howland Other Poems (1956) which sparked a famous obscenity trial. Keep up with happenings at City Lights via their blog http://blogcitylights.com/ . Here’s a great photo of Ferlinghetti and a 1958 display of banned books- long before the ALA designated its Banned Books Week.

Once again we observe Banned Books Week, in which our treasured freedom to choose what we read is celebrated. In this year’s Virtual Read-Out, celebrities and ordinary citizens read from banned and challenged books.

Stephen Chbosky, author of The Perks of Being a Wallflower:

Other Read-Out videos are on the YouTube BBW Virtual Read-Out channel:

Can we believe online reviews? In the UK, authors have been outed posing as fictitious characters, writing 5-star reviews of their own books and trashing other writers’ books. RJ Ellory and Stephen Leather have admitted to posing as ordinary readers to write glowing reviews for themselves while giving one star to their supposed competitors. Links to several articles about the subject:

Congratulations to our Education Department on its new Masters in Curriculum Leadership, a first at TWC! To provide graduate level research materials for students in this program, the library now offers Education Research Complete, a database containing full text for over 1,400 education journals and 550 books, and indexing and abstracts for 2,400 journals.

Dr. Durwood Dunn, chair of the TWC History Department, has a Kindle book! His 1988 book, Cades Cove: the Life and Death of an Appalachian Community, 1818-1937, is the University of Tennessee’s best-selling book. So popular, in fact, that they decided to put it on Kindle. So congratulate Dr. Dunn on going digital and start reading his e-book today. Or if you prefer to do your reading from paper and ink, the TWC Library has several copies on the shelf.

Library Director Sandra Clariday has published a book review in the latest issue of Tennessee Libraries. In her words, “The plot comes from events in rural Wilkes County, North Carolina, surrounding the murder of a young woman, Laura Foster, and subsequent hanging of Tom Dula, former Confederate soldier recently returned from the war. This is not a “whodunit” but a sordid story of betrayal and deceit set in an atmosphere of poverty, starvation, and racism.” You’ll find the book in our library at PS3563.C3527 B357 2011 Read the review below:

Encyclopaedia Britannica announced this week that it will cease publication of its print edition. Don’t forget, we have Britannica Online Academic in our database lineup. The editors at Britannica see this not as a sad ending but as a positive continuation of the digital services they have been offering for years, as they explain in this post.

As they say, “…the encyclopedia will live on- in bigger, more numerous, and more vibrant digital forms.” Our online edition has not only encyclopedia entries but maps, video, timelines, ebooks, and magazines.